neighbourhood

when i was 5 my cousin told me that shop dummys were people who were evil and got thier arms cut off and were covered in plastic in a factory in china. he also said they came to life at night and thats why they sometimes had on clothes on. then i realized they were hollow.:)

When I was younger, I used to think that by swimming in a public pool I would get pregnent. I knew that people peed in public pools and that if the pee went around, or, on my "girly part" I would get pregnant. Weiird...

In the UK, we have "Jet" petrol stations, I used to think real jets were there, so when I went past them, i covered my ears because I thought it would be really loud

Brown ice-cream trucks sold drugs, otherwise known as "pipe" to some of my strange friends.

I used to think 'To Let' on disused office buildings meant they were big toilets.

When i was little i used to believe that the people on billboards were giants. I thought that the photographers had to get giant people to take a picture of and then make a huge print out of the picture and there was the billboard.

When I was a kid I used to believe the "Help Wanted" signs up in store fronts were really a political statement in direct opposition to "Wanted: Dead or Alive" type posters.

In my rebellious stage (like, four years old) my dad told me that it was against the law not to take a shower before you go to the pool and that there were security cameras hidden in the showerheads and if you forget to take a shower the police would get you and you would go to jail for the rest of your life. I was scared into taking at least two showers before going to the pool and looked nervously at the showerheads. This was up until I forgot to shower, and all I got was the lifeguard telling me to do so.

What about Water Fairies? When I was 4, my big sister showed me he water fairies underwater at the bottom of the pool. Now, when you're four... those tiny blurry tingies at the bottom of the pool look kind of magical when you're floating around down there, and they float and shimmer around. We would always try and catch one, make a wish, then set her free again to get our wish. *Still today, as a grown woman, I always stop to try and find tiny fairies under the water, wherever I swim, remembering that memory, and passing it on to other kids.

There's a local grocery store around here called "Foodland". When I was really young, I imagined this place to be giant, mystical land; a wide, open field with plants growing any type of food you could imagine.

There was construction going on outside of our house one day when I was five or six, and I was curiously watching. There was a cement truck and I remember being very intruiged by it, until it started to move. The shoot (the long thing in which the cement flows out of the mixer) faced toward me and suddenly I went crying and screaming bloody murder out of the room. Horrified, my dad asked what was the matter and I dramatically replied "That truck stuck its tongue out at me!"

Apparently I use to believe that construction machinery had tongues.

i used to think that there were little men and woman who lived in street lights and that they turned them on and off. If a street light was broken i thought the little people moved out or were visiting other little people

My mom would always tell me to "jump" when we got to the bottom of escalators so that i wouldn't trip when i transferred myself from the moving stairs to the solid ground. This led me to think that if you didn't jump at the end of the escalator, you would get SUCKED into the stairs, and become part of the escalator.

how horrifying!! haha.

When I was about 6, I used to believe if I was at a neighbor's house it was my new house!

one of my classmates(in 2nd standard) once convinced me that there was a store tht sold the spiderman costume with the liquid for the webs. They just drilled a hole in the wrists and poured in the liquid. the button of the palm was always there when u wanted to have a go.

When I was little I thought street lights were homes for little gnomes and that they came on when the gnome needed more light. I was always really upset when I saw a street light not working - the little gnome had died!